Saturday, August 22, 2009

Bipolar Gardening, or, a Sad Tale of Neglect

And I don't mean like "two poles"--that would be great...maybe I'd have some more beans or peas or something growing. No, I mean that I have a double standard in my garden: one for the yard and one for the deck. Now, this year was our first foray into gardening. We have sincerely enjoyed it, but truthfully we haven't had a great harvest. I would even expect that we should have a LOT more tomatoes than we've had, but I've concluded that our soil is not rich enough yet. It is not composted with more than just purchased leaf compost (our own composts were not done yet, but next year, look out!) So we've had some very delicious tomatoes, just not a huge amount, like I was expecting out of 12 tomato plants. We have a zucchini plant, but have not had even one zucchini from it. We have a pumpkin plant that has overtaken the yard, but only three pumpkins. A cucumber plant that has grown up the fence but only produced three cucumbers. Our peas and beans produced about enough for a salad. Hmph. And this is the garden we've tended carefully. It's been a fun learning experience, but I want to do better next year.

On the other hand, I have utterly neglected my deck flowers. Truthfully, it gets so blazing hot out there on the deck that I hate to set foot out there during the day. Furthermore, I am usually so eager to see how my vegetables are doing I forget my little pots of flowers and fail to water them. this is the result:

I feel as though I ought to be punished somehow by the gardening authorities. It is just not in my nature to allow something to die for no reason. I would like to make a vow not to allow this to happen next year, but vows never suit me either (except the important ones, you know, like marriage). So I'm simply going to try much harder on my deck next year and hopefully have something more beautiful to show for it. Let's face it, I'm not the Pioneer Woman, at least not yet.